EmanuelaOrlandi posted:

why did this garbage thread get put on the front page wtf

catchphrase

Crow posted:

deadken posted:

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

All of this is just a schizoid reaction to feminism by unwanted, redundant beta males.

People who are getting happily laid and cuddled don’t become ‘Theonomists’

i think my period of peak frantic sexhavery coincided with peak fascism tho

woa, hold up, the peak of your misogyny coincided with the peak of your fascism? Hold up. Wait a minute. Hold up. Wait a minute. Hold up wait a minute wait a minute hold up

ahaha

The “alt right” rose to prominence due to its public support for Donald Trump during the 2016 US presidential election, but has much deeper roots in online “neo-reaction” and European “identarian movements” that have been emerging over the past decade. It speaks the exciting, facetious language of post-modern youth culture. It says: if you want to be a real “hipster” mining the past for prioritised goods, don’t just reanimate its material culture – its ball gowns and typewriters – rediscover its morals. Start reading Oswald Spengler, Joseph de Maistre and Thomas Carlyle because no one else is. Start worshipping the Great Man theory of history and naïve naturalism of Nietzsche, so easily bolted to the Gnostic fantasy worlds of computer war-games with all their militarism and magical technology. Take down that picture of Ché and that Soviet propaganda art, kids, and put up Yukio Mishima and Futurist art (and maybe even a picture of Hitler to shock people at just how “alternative” you really are). Christianity might have even become “cool” again, if only because of the authoritarian social value it is perceived as possessing for keeping radicals and Islamism down.

For the past thirty years Land has been trying to turn repellence into an art form. Back in the 90’s, when he was a communist (or something vaguely approximating it), Land made a cult name for himself by inventing “theory fiction”. A kind of extremely puerile mash of Nietzsche, Deleuze, the consumer waste of Georges Bataille and the sort of dated cyberpunk futurism one finds in all those z-grade Lawnmower Man films of the 1990s. Land has only ever believed in two things: techno-capitalism and Freud’s “death instinct”, both of which he takes together as a liberating solvent “accelerating” towards dissolution. Modernity emerges out of Europe at the end of the Middle Ages like a mechanical disease, destined to digest the entire planet until man evanesces like “some loathsome dream” into the machinery.

Brutally anti-humanist, Land in his desire for transhumanist salvation in the 1990s conjured up a paranoid world where fascists, priests, humanists and just about everyone who wasn’t him became one and the same. A force of “Turing Cops” trying to hold back the liberating dissolution of mankind into the machine. They all want to keep man a peasant digging over the same piece of ground forever, because of their fear of him internalising an alien “cyberplague” of techno-capitalism that has taken on a life of its own. Land so hates the human race that the only thing it seems good for is for producing a liberated Nietzschean posthuman. As Nietzsche cried out, and Deleuze imitated: “the levelling process of European man is the great process which should not be checked: one should even accelerate it”. As John Gray has said: “Nietzsche never escaped from the Christian world-view he attacked. His idea of the superman shows him trying to construct a new redemptive myth.” Voegelin would surely agree. What we have with Land is a kind of highly predictable and rather banal millenarian heresy delivered through magical machinery.

The fact is that Deleuze and Guattari (far more influential than the former on his own) made their cosmos of fold-up schizoid sex machines look so damn hip, rebellious and edgy. Surely if everyone becomes a desublimated posthuman Anti-Oedipus or a “nomad” technocrat with their own computer, the magic of the cyborg rhizome can cure the world of evil patriarchs, humanists and dualists? So what if the Israeli military uses Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus as a military guidebook or that governments have been thinking about the internet as “rhizome” at least as long as hackers? To call Deleuze’s ideas merely groovy “packaging” to cover over a hollow “nonsense machine” like Roger Scruton does misses the point that packaging sells. We live in an era of edgy kitsch still trying to mine the undead rebelliousness of the Space Age. Certainly both Foucault and Žižek have suspected that our age is already an ideologically “Deleuzian epoch” – one of pop Nietzscheism and the tacky fetishism of mutants, robots and banal transgression for its own sake. To call what Deleuze produced an accidental neo-liberal pure ideology incapable of being alternative or “outsider” today is an understatement.

On another note, there was an amusing now-deleted tumblr post passed around in the reactionary blogosphere citing lf and its diaspora as the prototype of 'ironic' internet fascism. This is probably wrong (or not, remember when everyone was reading cyclonopedia?) but its funny to think of this whole situation as an SA/4chan feud. But this is just why none of this is worth taking seriously. Your average internet fascist has far more in common with his communist counterparts than he does with any existing far-right organization. The latter would probably be unable to tell them apart. People like land can fuck off to singapore and subsist on drugs, others will get publishing deals and sell books to bitter 30 year old computer programmers in open relationships.

forgot the link https://voegelinview.com/author/jonathan-ratcliffe/

Edited by kinch (June 4, 2017 20:41:17)

trakfactri posted:

I've got an effort post on fascism coming up in a let's read thread. Stay tuned.

try not to entertain the fiction it's in any way good or cool. thanks